We could have found the French Airplane in less than an hour!

[Gucko]

We could have found the French Airplane in less than an hour!


Don't you really guys agree that we could have found the French airplane in less than an hour, if we have a real-time Google earth?

Millions of Internet users could just used a real-time satellite program to locate the crash scene. I wonder why such a thing doesn't exist.

I know this has cons but it has pros as well ;)
It could be wonderful to see your friends from above in another country in real-time :)
Or maybe explore a forest, or even tack animals.

People might say that we need lots of satellites for such a purpose cuz lots of people will use that, but think about, we don't need a satellite for each person. Because a satellite cover *a lot* of space and of course lots of people purposes will intersect ;)

Actually we already have a LOT of satellites around the earth, just all the countries have to unite :)

It's something like GPS.

Is there any commerical company for such a purpose (real-time satillite)?

[gn2]

Finding it in an hour wouldn't have made any difference to the outcome.

[pwnst*r]

odd post.

[Sub101]

We DO need a lot of more satellites. Each user would have to request said satellite focus on a specific area. They would be unable, with any detail, to cover a large area or no doubt even a town.

Not to mention the series of privacy implications. Remember the fury over Google Street View, imagine how angry people would be active, real time monitoring.

As for the plane crash, I understand one lady was able to ring the mobile of someone on the plane. If this is the case, I am surprised the service provider can not pin point the location of the crash. I assume there is a technical issue here which I am unaware of.

[Gucko]

Finding it in an hour wouldn't have made any difference to the outcome.

Oh! We could have saved some people.

[dragos240]

I wonder WHEN we'll find the airplane. We've found scraps but not the whole, or any signs of survivors.

[Sub101]

Oh! We could have saved some people.

It must depend on the circumstances of the crash, which to my knowledge is still unknown.

[Gucko]

What's the strangest part here is that why the US of France didn't use their military satellites to locate the crash? They could have just quered the satellites to point to a HOT or WORM area in the Atlantic. Just as we see in movies. I don't think this is unachievable. It MUST be!

[gn2]

Oh! We could have saved some people.

How?

This is out in the middle of the ocean, how are you going to get rescue vessels there quickly?

[Gucko]

Ohh I really want to won a satellite :)

[pwnst*r]

Ohh I really want to won a satellite :)

what?

[Gucko]

How?

This is out in the middle of the ocean, how are you going to get rescue vessels there quickly?

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad (depends on the circumstances ). I think if there are survivors, they can hold some pieces from the plane and stay above the water. So if we can find them *quickly*, they don't have to die from cold and hunger. I'm not making things easy, but I'm just saying that this can happen. We just have to act quickly.

[jflaker]

real time is only available to the owners (usually governments) and ONLY if the satellites are close to are already closing into position.

All these maps, like google maps are sewn together, much like you would stitch several photographs from your digital camera to create a huge panarama. These photos are in strips, so to get the next set of photos, you would need to wait about 30-45 minutes before the satellite comes back around from its orbit and hopefully will be in the right spot.

The only way, which is and never will be feasible, is to have enough geostationary satellites on the ready to scan an area of interest.

unless we have a manned spaceship with many cameras, instead of a manned satellite (which is always in orbit) on the ready, we will never see any real time satellite imagery in this or any foreseeable lifetime.

[Daremo_06]

We DO need a lot of more satellites.

I'll be happy to start taking donations for buying more satallites... :D

[m-p{3}]

That would be interesting to see some kind of distributed satellite search, where everybody get a specific area to analyze. In the event of an plane dissapearance take a snapshot of the area, and then allocate an area to those willing to analyze a part of the image. When somebody find something suspicious, highlight the part of the image and send back the results.

Like some kind of distributed password bruteforcing. The more users there is, the faster we are done searching.

[Keithhed]

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad (depends on the circumstances ). I think if there are survivors, they can hold some pieces from the plane and stay above the water. So if we can find them *quickly*, they don't have to die from cold and hunger. I'm not making things easy, but I'm just saying that this can happen. We just have to act quickly.

are you serious? have you ever dove into a pool from even 10m and felt the resistance from the water. imagine tons of aircraft falling from thousands of feet. it would be like nose dive into concrete. water landing is not any better than on the ground. (unless you can land it into the Hudson river like recently. a plane falling from any height is not likely to do well in the landing. sad but true.

my sympathies go out to those who were on the flight and thier loved ones...

[lethalfang]

Satellites might be useful if they know where to look, and if the airplane is not moving, and if the weather is perfectly clear, and if there is a satellite nearby, and.......

[Daremo_06]

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad (depends on the circumstances ). I think if there are survivors, they can hold some pieces from the plane and stay above the water. So if we can find them *quickly*, they don't have to die from cold and hunger. I'm not making things easy, but I'm just saying that this can happen. We just have to act quickly.

Hmmm

Go rent Jaws. Listen to the part about when Quinn tells the story about the Indianapolis getting sunk. And that was in tropical water where hypothermia wasn't an issue....

Also, plane ditchings in the ocean are not easy. The hudson river crash earlier this year, was perfectly executed by an expert pilot. One mistake and that plane cartwheels and we have a whole bunch of dead people instead of everyone living.

[Keithhed]

Satellites might be useful if they know where to look, and if the airplane is not moving, and if the weather is perfectly clear, and if there is a satellite nearby, and.......

+1 it was in the middle of a bad storm.

[m-p{3}]

are you serious? have you ever dove into a pool from even 10m and felt the resistance from the water. imagine tons of aircraft falling from thousands of feet. it would be like nose dive into concrete. water landing is not any better than on the ground. (unless you can land it into the Hudson river like recently. a plane falling from any height is not likely to do well in the landing. sad but true.

my sympathies go out to those who were on the flight and thier loved ones...

Indeed. Life is not like GTA IV, from where you can jump out of an helicopter, fall into a pool and survive without a scratch.

[gn2]

All I can say Gucko is that you seem to have no knowledge of what's involved concerning this incident.

Even if the plane remained controllable after contact was lost, the pilots would not have been able to land it safely on the water because it was dark and they could not have seen the surface of the water.

The surface would also have required to be billiard table smooth for the aircraft to stand any chance of remaining reasonably intact at the landing speed of roughly 150mph.
The presence of thunderstorms means that the water definitely would not have been smooth at all.

[Gucko]

Yeah that's correct I think I just imagined too much (that was really just an imagine) about finding survivors, but the topic is all about locating the plane.

[MarcusA]

Do the black boxes still give out signals?

[Chilli Bob]

It may sound petty, but I feel I should point out a few errors in the original post.

1. The images on Google earth are a composite of satellite and aerial photographs. If you can see any useful detail, then it was taken from a plane, not a satellite. Not even the best military satellites provide the level of detail shown on most google maps, and if they did, we wouldn't have access to them.

2. Those satelites that could provide sufficent resolution to find plane wreckage are in orbits that take them over military points of interest (e. North Korea). It is not an easy thing to change their orbit to target another location, basically you have to let the earth rotate under the satellite and try and time the satelite to be passing over the spot you want at just the right time, not easy with the speed low earth orbit satelites are travelling. It's not like the movies.

3. In order to let give enough resolution to find wreckage, (you will need approx 10cm resolution to identify floating wreckage amoungst whitecaps, and I don't believe any satelite comes close) you would need hundreds of sweeps over the search area (which would be hundreds of km square). This would takes weeks.

4. If you want to look for temperature differences, you will need a completely different type of satelite (used for weather, climate, land use research etc rather than just visible photography) These have a resolution of about a KM at best as that is all they need for such work. This is no good for finding plane wreckage. There may be military satelites with higher resolution, but they are not going to divert them for something as trivial as a plane wreck.

5. Even if there was a suitable satelite available, by the time it could be sent over the are in question, the hot engines will have either sunk, or cooled to the water temperature, so the satelite will be useless.

6. Even if we had a suitable satelite that could photograph the search area at a usefull resolution, and could provide real time data on the web (all not possible), how would you organise the search? To be of any use, you would need to organuise people to look in specific locations, in a specific way. (It is EXTREAMLY hard to spot a fluru orange life raft at 2000ft, let alone satelite heights). To set up a website and data base that can allocate and track voluteers and their allocated area would take a lot more than an hour.

7. I could go on about the expense and impracticality of live google maps, but there really is no need.

[Regenweald]

It is pitiful that this thread has a smiley face attached to it. Your less than adequate knowledge in all regards of this topic has produced a childish OP, disrespectful to the memory of 200 lives.

[Keithhed]

It is pitiful that this thread has a smiley face attached to it. Your less than adequate knowledge in all regards of this topic has produced a childish OP, disrespectful to the memory of 200 lives.

+ infinity. thread closed?

[lovinglinux]

If worldwide real-time satellite could be done, I'm sure the satellites would go nuts with millions of people searching Beverly Hills swimming pools, the ISP's would throttle Google Earth connections like they do with torrents and MPAA would sue everyone for "violation of boobsright".

[pwnst*r]

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad

wow.

you seriously need to rethink that statement.

[lovinglinux]

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad

I have a couple of friends that didn't crashed, but they stayed floating in the water, being carried away by currents for an entire night, until a Navy airplane found them the day after. It wasn't near the seashore, it was in the middle of the ocean near an oceanic island, exactly in the path of the French airplane. They were really freaking scared. Image adding the plain crash to that equation? Even if you survive the crash, the experience is extremely traumatic and the chances of being rescued are extremely low.

[3rdalbum]

Satellites can't take optical images through clouds. They crashed in the middle of a storm. I don't think the thermal imagery would have helped either - the engines would be the first things to break off and sink, and by the time anyone realised that the plane was missing, the engines would have probably nearly been on the bottom of the ocean. I doubt you'd be able to pick up the residual heat of the engines through 1000 feet of water.

[Sinkingships7]

Common I don't think crashing in the middle of the ocean is that bad.

This is sick. I'm hoping you're young and misinformed. I reckon this thread will be closed very soon.